Beach House’s Guide to Music Festivals and Keeping It Interesting on the Road

Around the time Alex Scally started Beach House with Victoria Legrand in 2004, the guitarist and keyboardist was working alongside his father as a carpenter in Baltimore. It’s training that’s served him well in one of indie rock’s most tireless touring bands, the sort of act that does 100+ dates across three or four continents with every album by default: Scally has hand-built many of Beach House’s live set-pieces over the years.

Their visuals have moved beyond the scope of carpentry—towards sheets of organza hanging amid layers of light on their current tour behind last year’s Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars—but Scally and Legrand still design their own shows. This is rarer than one might think for a band of their level, but it’s not exactly surprising: Scally and Legrand’s music chases the ever-nebulous “vibe,” but they’re meticulous in capturing exactly what they hear between them. Beach House shows, by extension, attempt to offer a visual manifestation of the duo’s dreamy soundscapes with a strategic use of light; they’ll carve little patterns of it and start layering them, they’ll remove it completely, they’ll shroud themselves in deep blues and reds as the songs call for it. Of course, all this subtle mood-building is infinitely easier to do in a dark club before a couple thousand people or a custom-built art installation to a few hundred than in a big outdoor festival. Nevertheless, festivals are part of the game, so Beach House plays those, too.

By the time the summer comes to a close, they’ll have played—as a four-piece with bassist/keyboardist Skyler Skjelset and drummer James Barone—Coachella, both Primavera Sounds, the Netherlands’ Best Kept Secret, Outside Lands, Pickathon, FYF, Hopscotch, and of course, Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, where they’ll headline July 15th. Before they really get into the swing of things on the fest front, we spoke with Scally by phone from Baltimore about the challenges that accompany main-stage territory, Beach House’s most miserable festival appearances, how great GNR (supposedly) were at Coachella, and their plans for more intimate and unconventional shows.

Pitchfork: You and Vic are meticulous about setting a palpable, oftentimes dark mood with your club shows, but then y’all play so many festivals. How do you translate that into an outdoor festival setting?

Alex Scally: You want to hear about our Coachella outfits. [Laughs] Well, the cool thing is it’s chill and sexy at the same time.

And how do you strike that balance?

It's not easy. First you’ve got to hire a stylist. You can't possibly do that on your own. Denims… Okay, well, I don”t know. Since we’re just getting into festival season, we’re figuring all that out right now, actually.

Figuring out what, specifically?

Tour is a constantly evolving thing. It took us, like, 50 shows to get the show where it’s at now, so that’s why, for festivals, we’re trying to just do the exact same thing. We spent two or three days trying to figure out how to make an outdoor festival feel as much like our show as possible. Our show is based a lot on projections—not so much for projecting stuff you recognize, but more about using projectors as if they were light fixtures—so we found different projectors that are high-powered for outdoors and set them up in different angles. It’s all about dimensions, contrast, patterns, motion, lots of negative space.

We use a fabric [organza] for our regular show [as the backdrop] that we’ve really fallen in love with, because it really appears and disappears, but it’s not equipped for wind or even the outdoors, and neither is the rigging. So we ordered this different fabric [textilene, like a PVC-coated polyester] that’s made for high wind, and we demoed it. We were able to use it at the first Coachella, but not the second one because there was a windstorm. It was a little different but we were able to use all of the same cues and equipment, more or less. We felt good that it did feel like our show, but we'll learn a lot as we go on.

I imagine this trial-and-error of alternate materials and stagings has gotten easier over time.

We’ve been doing this so much, for so long, that things have grown simpler as time’s gone on. We’ve also learned what things to fight for, and to not worry too much about things. We’ve gotten way more like, “All right, so it’s too windy, we can’t use it,” or, “Something’s broken, let’s just play music as much as we can and if people like it, they’ll like it.”

Maybe with the rise of electronic music and such, festivals can almost be too dependent on visual aspects. Not to be one of those old-timers, but I kind of love when I see shows where it’s like, “Let’s just play music up here.” I'm not a huge Guns N’ Roses fan at all, and I actually didn't really know much about them, but I saw them at Coachella—the second weekend, apparently the first weekend they were terrible. I was super into how they had nothing going on, really. They had a couple lights. But I was like, “Damn, these guys just played some rock music for two and a half hours up there.” That was cool. To some degree, we’re not that worried about it. We’re just going to try to play our music the best that we can, and to make it our own.

Do you take a different approach when putting together a setlist for a festival, vs. your own show?

We definitely alter the set a little bit and make it more energetic, as much as we do “energetic.” But we still try to write a little story. We don’t just want [the setlist] to be non-sequitur. We don’t write setlists ahead of time, though. One of the things we do every day on tour is wait to see what’s happening in each place. What’s the energy like here? What are the people like? What’s the venue like? Are we in a tent, on a stage? All of that information factors heavily into what we decide to play on a given day.

It was really strange playing Coachella, because every other thing happening around us was hard EDM. Flume was after us. Diplo was before us. Calvin Harris was the headliner that night. It was all this intense, super loud, not a single sound is coming from an instrument—that kind of music. Our show relies quite heavily on sensory deprivation. One of the things we always try to do is get people to expect less as soon as they walk in. Have it be really dark, really quiet. As we create music, the more subtle things emerge. But I feel like at Coachella people have just been getting blasted so hard all day, by the time they came to us, it was like we weren’t even there. The sound just couldn’t compete with the sensory destruction they had been undergoing the entire day.

It’s really crazy how different all festivals really are. Primavera is a late festival, and it’s really moody, wonderful, kind of romantic. There’s a lot more liberties there. You don't have to feel as entertaining—people will go with you on more of a journey.

Do you remember the very first festival you played?

The first one we ever played was 2007 Pitchfork Festival, which was a total disaster. We so weren’t prepared for what was expected. We were on a side stage and there was a loud band playing—we couldn't hear ourselves at all. We weren’t used to the whole thing of, “You have 20 minutes to get on stage and get everything together.” I think it was a pretty poor performance. We were sitting down still at that point. We learned a lot in those early years.

Any other disastrous festival performances that taught you something?

At one point, before we had sound people, we wrote a song called “Festival.” It was like a three-minute song that we thought sounded cool, where each instrument came in one at a time. It was designed so that every time an instrument came in, we could look over to the monitor person and say “up” or “down,” so that that first three minutes of the show wasn’t a disaster. That was a big thing we did for about a year, around 2009. But we had a really, really bad show at Sasquatch 2009—probably one of the worst shows of our entire career.

What happened?

Literally just screeching feedback for 25 minutes. Like, you’re playing a song but it’s not a song and nothing’s happening. You’re confused. The audience is confused. People are walking away.

Obviously you’re not screeching feedback now, but do you still see any of the audience casually come and go at festivals? And does it bother you at all?

You can’t be a baby and complain about that. You said yes to the festival, you have to expect that someone’s going to walk up and be like, “This band sucks!” and walk away. Festivals can be really amazing, but I also think that they’re not the best thing for listeners. They’re like the Costco of music experiences: You get more for less money, but it’s always of a lower quality. The bands don’t soundcheck, and the crowd is in a weird, uncomfortable situation. Sometimes they can be insanely magical, but also sometimes they can be really kind of a sad affair, where nothing sounds that great, or looks that great, or is that great. Everybody’s struggling. It’s also sometimes the cooler, early-day bands that suffer the most, because they’re not prepared for that situation. They just aren’t experienced or don't have a lot of crew; sometimes in that position you really lose out at festivals.

At this point, Beach House will always be playing at night on a festival lineup, right?

We’ve begged and asked for it, because daytime really doesn’t work for us. We usually don’t accept a festival unless we can play at night, just because we think that’s where our music makes the most sense.

Let's talk about the installation shows you wrapped last month. You had these glass installations of illuminated florals, which were mimicked in the projections that swirled around the walls. Was the hope that the crowd specifically wouldn’t look at you and Vic?

No, it didn't really matter. We just thought the more we destabilized where viewers direct their attention—the way everyone just sits and stares in one direction the entire time—the greater chance we'd have of people getting lost. If they weren't just filing into the typical show experience, then they would hopefully lose the attendee-performer relationship to some degree and get into their heads—think more, feel more.

I was relieved to not see anyone on their phones at the Brooklyn show.

We asked for no phones and no pictures, because of the light that it would create. And we had so many people be like, “I was so happy to not touch my phone for an hour!” It's kind of crazy how that's such a universal issue right now. People hate the amount that they're on them, but they can't control it.

Some bands have a policy about that at all their shows. Would you consider anything like that in the future?

We say no photography at our shows, but also, people go out once a month and they pay a lot for shows. I feel a little annoying, like it's asking too much or is a little bit pretentious to say, “Don't pull out your iPhone at our show!” And for fans not to be able to take pictures and remember it. We're not in a position to do that, and it would be unfair to the people who support us and make our career. I went to a Prince concert where he did that, and someone actually got tossed. The tickets were unreal expensive, too. He said, “Absolutely no cell phones.” I thought that was a little insane, a little disrespectful. But you know, that's his prerogative. I'm sure everybody was still delighted to be there. We were delighted to be there! It felt really severe: Someone really got tossed out. It wasn't even a warning. It was crazy.

Do you think y’all will do more installation shows down the line?

Yeah. If we're going to continue being a band and trying to do things that are interesting for ourselves and everyone else, we have to push it and make things that we care about. I'm sure we're going to do things other than the traditional show in the future, just because it's exciting and stimulating, but I don't know if it will be this one again. We want to continue to create an experience that isn't just the same old thing.

I imagine the constant refining and evolution of the show must also help to keep you from burning out or growing bored when you’re touring for the better part of a year.

Well, one of the big reasons why we did this after doing four cycles—our first four records—the exact same way, and one of the goals behind the whole two records thing [releasing *Depression Cherry *and *Thank Your Lucky Stars *within months of each other last year], was that we know that to do this as a career, you have to play 150 shows. You don't have to, but this is the way we do it. The solution we came up with was doing a second type of show, adding shows the whole cycle, and adding the new songs. It’s really helped this year feel consistently inspiring as we've been on the road, and not just, “Shit, here we go again. Here's another show.” Which is to me one of the saddest feelings, because music starts as such a beautiful, earnest thing and the commercial forces of touring can take so much out of it. We're 110 shows since the first one, and no one’s bored yet.